14

      Elsa Cassani had the washed-out complexion of a young woman who had spent the bulk of her twenty-seven years sitting behind computer monitors in darkened rooms. A full-figured, lively Italian with stud ear-rings and a steady smile, she had called Kell’s mobile shortly after twelve o’clock and arranged to pick up the SIM and BlackBerry from a café on the Rue de l’Hôtel des Postes.

      The handover was straightforward. As instructed, Elsa had put on a hat, found herself a table and ordered a Campari and soda. (‘Ah,’ she had said, enjoying the trick. ‘Because it’s red.’) Within a few minutes, Kell had strolled in, spotted the hat and the drink, handed over the hardware and told her that he needed the results ‘by sunset’. He had then walked off in the general direction of the Mediterranean leaving Elsa alone at the table. Nobody had batted an eyelid. No need for the discipline of a formal brush contact. No need for Moscow Rules.

      Kell had forgotten how much he disliked Nice. The city had none of the character that he associated with France: it felt like a place with no history, a city that had never suffered. The too-clean streets, the incongruous palm trees, the poseurs on the boardwalks and the girls who weren’t quite pretty: Nice was an antiseptic playground for rich foreigners who didn’t have the imagination to spend their money properly. ‘The place,’ he muttered to himself, remembering the old joke, ‘where suntans go to die.’ Kell recalled his last visit to the city, an overnight stay in 1997, tracking a Real IRA commander who had struck up a friendship with an unsavoury Chechen money launderer with a villa in Villefranche. Kell had flown down on a soggy May morning to find a ghostly and sterile city, the cloistered cafés surrounding the old port deserted, the Café de Turin serving half a dozen oysters to half a dozen customers. It was different now, a tornado of summer tourists in the city, taking up every inch of sand on the beach, every changing room in the smart boutiques on Rues Paradis and Alphonse Karr. Kell began to wish that he had simply stayed in his hotel, lived off room service and watched pay-per-view movies and BBC World. Instead, he found a brasserie two blocks back from the Med, ordered inedible steak frites from a pretty Parisian waitress who smouldered for tips, and began to work his way through the copy of Seamus Heaney’s The Spirit Level that he had packed at the last minute in London. Behind the bar, a fifty-something proprietor who appeared to have modelled his appearance on Johnny Hallyday was killing time on an iPhone, trying to catch his reflection in a nearby mirror. Kell had long ago concluded that all restaurants in the south of France were run by the same middle-aged proprietor on his thirty-fourth wife with the same paunch, the same tan and the same bombshell waitress whom he was inevitably trying to fuck. This one kept scratching an itch in the crack of his bum, like Rafael Nadal preparing to serve. When it was time to settle the bill, Kell decided to have some fun with him.

      ‘The steak was tough,’ he said in English.

      ‘Comment?’

      The proprietor was looking past his shoulder, as though it was beneath his dignity to make eye contact with a Brit. ‘I said the steak was tough.’ Kell gestured towards the kitchen. ‘The food in this place is only marginally better than the stuff they served up in Papillon.’

      ‘Quoi?’

      ‘You think it’s OK to charge tourists eighteen euros for medium-rare chewing gum?’

      ‘Il y a un problème, monsieur?’

      Kell turned around. ‘Never mind,’ he said. It had been enough to see Hallyday stirred from his complacency. The waitress appeared to have overheard their conversation and honoured Kell with a flirtatious smile. He left fifty euros of Truscott’s money for her on the table and walked out into the afternoon sunshine.

      A wise man once said that spying is waiting. Waiting for a joe. Waiting for a break. Kell killed time by wandering the streets of Vieux Nice and the Yves Klein galleries at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. On a steel bench in the mezzanine he checked the messages on his London phone. Claire had left a series of increasingly irate texts from the waiting room of their marriage guidance counsellor. He had completely forgotten the appointment.

      Thanks a lot. Total fucking waste of my fucking time.

      He did not want to explain himself, to confess that Marquand had brought him in from the cold. Instead, texting quickly, he wrote:

      Sorry. Totally forgot. Crazy 24 hrs. I am Nice.

      It was only when she responded with a string of three bewildered question marks that he checked the outgoing message and saw his mistake. He called Claire to explain, but the line went direct to voicemail.

      Sorry. I realize that I am not particularly nice. I meant to say that I am in Nice. As in France. Had to come here on business at the last minute. I completely forgot about the appointment. Will you apologize to …

      But Kell could not remember the name of the marriage guidance counsellor; he could only picture her hair, a bob, her biscuits, the clock that ticked on the mantelpiece. He fudged it:

       … the good doctor. Just say that I’m too busy. Call me back if you get the chance. I’m hanging around waiting for a meeting.

      He knew that Claire would join the dots. She was too well versed in the euphemisms of the secret world not to read between the lines: ‘last-minute business’; ‘waiting for a meeting’; ‘had to go to France’. Thomas Kell was a disgraced spook; he no longer had any business; he didn’t need to go to any meetings. What possible reason would he have for flying to Nice at the last minute if not to run some errand for SIS? One of the features of his long career had been the necessity to lie to Claire about the nature of his work. Kell had enjoyed the brief respite from such fabrications, but was now back in the same cycle of concealment that he had spun for twenty years; back in the habit, so natural to him and so easily acquired, of keeping anybody who came close to him at arm’s length. In this context, he wondered why Claire was keen on seeing a shrink. There was no ‘structural flaw’ in their marriage – a phrase the counsellor had used, time and again, with apparent relish. Neither was there any ‘hard-wired animosity’ between them. On the rare occasions that they met to discuss their future, Mr and Mrs Thomas Kell inevitably ended up in bed together, waking in the morning to wonder why on earth they were living apart. But the reason for that was clear. The reason for that was unequivocal. Without children, they were finished.

      Elsa eventually rang at five and they arranged to meet outside the Negresco Hotel.

      It was like meeting a different person. In the five hours that she had been analysing the hardware, Elsa appeared to have undergone a complete transformation. Her pale skin was suddenly ruddy with health, as though she had returned from a long walk along the beach, and her eyes, so lifeless in the café, sparkled in the dazzling summer light. Earlier, she had seemed nervous and closed-off; now she was animated and full of warmth. So easy was the rapport between them that Kell toyed with the idea that she had been ordered by Marquand to win his trust.

      ‘How was your afternoon?’ she asked as they walked in the direction of a dazzling sun.

      ‘Great,’ Kell lied, because he was glad of her company after the long afternoon and did not want to appear negative by complaining. ‘I had some lunch, went to a gallery, read a book …’

      ‘I really do not like Nice at all,’ Elsa declared, her English precise and musical.

      ‘Me neither.’ She looked across at him and smiled at the sudden fracturing in Kell’s composure. ‘It’s